But for a people whose history in America is a long, brutal chronicle of a rigged marketplace, transaction alone is not enough. Black voters cannot afford to reject transactional politics outright. We need resources, policy commitments, appointments, protections, and measurable gains. But we also cannot mistake a transaction for transformation. The question is not whether Black voters should be transactional. The question is whether each transaction builds the power necessary to transform the conditions under which the next transaction happens.
That distinction matters and a conversation without a discussion of both fails in application. Here is why, a transaction assumes a fair market: two parties exchanging goods of equal value under mutually agreed-upon terms. That has never been the political environment in which Black people have operated. Enslaved Africans could not negotiate their way out of bondage. There was no fair deal to be struck with a system that defined them as property and counted them as fractions of human beings. No concession from a slaveholder could transform the fundamental evil of owning another person. Freedom required abolition. Abolition was not a transaction. It was a transformation of law, labor, citizenship, and moral possibility.
Jim Crow told the same story in different clothes. Could Black people have negotiated for a slightly better seat on the segregated bus? A marginally better-funded segregated school? Perhaps. That would have been the transactional approach: an exchange of political quiet for a modest improvement in our subordinate status. But a marginally improved subordinate status is still subordinate. The Civil Rights Movement was not built merely on better terms within segregation. It demanded the destruction of segregation itself.
Dr. Amanda Wilkerson
That is the work, transacting to transform.
When we transact in a system built to give us as little as possible, the danger is that we begin to legitimize the system that makes it okay to oppress. We accept the premise that the system is a neutral arbiter of value. But what is the going rate for a Black vote these days? An executive order that can disappear under the next administration? A pilot program that gets negotiated down in budget talks? A task force with no enforcement power? If we reduce our sacred franchise to a coin dropped into the party machine, we consent to a cycle of managed wins and loses. We want to be clear, transactional politics can get us something. Transformational politics asks whether that something propels power to push past subjugation.
Dr. Valerie Wilkerson
Consider this, transformational politics does not reject the transaction. It disciplines it.
It asks: What does this policy build? Who does it empower? What institution does it strengthen? What protection does it make harder to reverse? What organizing capacity does it leave behind? Does it merely respond to harm, or does it change the conditions that keep producing harm?
That is the difference between spending political power and investing it.
And here is the part people rarely say out loud: transformation often requires us to give more to the movement than the system has ever been willing to give to us. That is not because we are endlessly resilient. That is because power compounds when people organize beyond the immediate exchange.
So yes, Black voters should be strategic. Yes, we should make demands. Yes, we should ask what we are getting in return. But we should also ask whether what we receive helps build the world we deserve. The only transaction worth making is one that moves us toward transformation; to be: truly free, truly equal, and fully powerful.
